The Airfield: Finding My Grandfather's WWII Station in France

My grandfather’s air base in France, WWII. © Erin Faith Allen

I am fresh off the plane, and I am standing on ground my grandfather stood on in 1944.

This airfield in France has been through several iterations in the decades since the war. The Luftwaffe took it from the French. The Americans wrestled it from the Luftwaffe. Now it is back in French hands, a small and quiet airport set in the middle of a meadow, with a memorial to the Americans who helped return France to itself.

I stop at the memorial first, and then I see them: a cluster of old buildings almost hidden at the far edge of the meadow, and something in me moves before I have fully registered what I am looking at.

Scouring dirt roads and gates relentlessly until I find my way in. Then, I am here.

Where my grandfather worked on this land is unknown. I know he was here for one month in 1944, in the company of the men who flew bombing raids over Europe, and that this ground held him before the war sent him further east. Standing inside these buildings,

I run my hand along what remains and let the not-knowing be enough.

He was here. I am here. Seventy-something years is not so long when the walls are still standing.

The meadow is quiet. The French sky is wide and flat and grey at the edges.

Somewhere under all of this, the war is still present if you know how to look for it, and I have spent enough time learning how to look.